HOUSE PROUD

HOUSE PROUD; Fine, Found And Borrowed

By RAUL A. BARRENECHE

Published: June 17, 2004

CHRISTINE Y. KIM was racing through dusty galleries at the Studio Museum in Harlem one morning in April, the din of hammers and drills reverberating around her. Ms. Kim, 32, an assistant curator, was helping workers move a temporary wall so that a crate containing 64 photographs by the artist Fred Wilson could be unloaded for a retrospective of his work, which opened on April 28.

Ms. Kim stood out among the whitewashed walls and brown paper floor covering in her oversize hoop earrings and an orange T-shirt printed with ''Homies East L.A.,'' a rapper riff on the Hermès Paris logo. Hours later, Ms. Kim traded in her uptown T-shirt for a lacy Peter Som dress with grosgrain ribbons and an Empire waist, and gave a dinner party for 15 friends in her 1,400-square-foot loft on the Lower East Side.

While Ms. Kim served Asian pork loin, her guests lounged on a Mies van der Rohe daybed and plastic cushions from Ikea near paintings by Nadine Robinson, a British-born black artist, and Candice Breitz, who is a white South African.

''There's a freshness and confidence in her living style,'' said Steven P. Henry, one the guests and a director of the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea. ''A lot of people mix and match by looking through magazines. She does it by instinct.''

Ms. Kim is an emerging ''it girl'' in the culture world. Poised and crisply well spoken, she is conversant with high culture and low, from young African artists to downtown clubs. (After moving to New York in 1993, she played bass in Trixie Belden, an all-girl punk band.) Her mixmaster's touch is reflected in her newly renovated apartment, which blends pedigreed pieces with street scavengings and Korean antiques with Modernist classics.

''There are things from all over the world,'' she said. ''It's like an edgy goulash -- a bunch of things stewed together -- a little bit punk, a little bit Old World.''

The look of the loft is laid-back and casual, but everything about Ms. Kim is carefully considered. She chooses her words with exacting precision, and even her interests seem carefully weighted for high-low effect. She is a fan of punk rock and martial arts films, for example, but is also frequently photographed by Vogue and W at runway shows and museum openings.

Thelma Golden, the chief curator of the Studio Museum, recalled Ms. Kim's cinematic departure from a party at the Venice Biennale last June. ''She was wearing a gorgeous gold Peter Som dress, waving down a vaporetto outside the Peggy Guggenheim Collection,'' she said.

Ms. Kim may cultivate a glamour-girl profile, but, Ms. Golden said, ''she can also get down with the sheetrock.'' Ms. Kim had plenty of chances to prove it when she renovated her third-floor apartment, above a former dance hall on the corner of Eldridge and Rivington Streets.

''I'm a curator,'' she said. '' I'm not afraid of walls. In a museum they go up and come down all the time.''

The neighborhood may be cool, but the apartment was impossibly dowdy and decrepit when she bought it, in December of 2002. ''The three bedrooms were tiny, like jail cells,'' she said. ''There were burn marks on the wall above the stove.''

''I imagined a lot of people had seen the space and been intimidated by it,'' she added. ''But being a curator, I could imagine the potential. I had seen over 200 places, and I knew right away this was the one.''

Her budget for the renovation, including living room furniture, was less than $50,000. To save money, she did without a contractor or designer, relying instead on help from laborers she found in the neighborhood. ''I just asked around, talked to people I saw on the street,'' she said.

One worker, the superintendent of a nearby building, put together a small crew to do skilled work like wiring and tiling. Ms. Kim could afford to pay rent on her old apartment in NoLIta for only one month after buying the new place, so she moved in before the renovation was finished. She arrived just after the rubble from the demolition had been hauled out, in February 2003. The gutted interior looked ''like a ski lodge after an avalanche,'' she said. ''There was wood leaning against the walls and dust everywhere.''

When the time came for materials and furnishings, Ms. Kim searched the city for inexpensive sources, often hauling her finds home on the subway in the dead of winter.

When she first saw the bathroom, it had cracked tiles in a 1970's palette of white, brown and blue. ''It looked like a Best Western,'' she said. To remake it, she bought sinks, bathroom faucets and a tub at the Home Depot in Long Island City and tiles at Bella Tile in the East Village. ''I wanted the bathroom to have the feeling of a pool house or a cabana,'' she said.

For the kitchen, she bought a used work table at a restaurant supplier in Chinatown and hired a fabricator to make steel countertops. The cabinets, with solid oak doors and veneer oak interiors, came from Ikea. The entire kitchen, including appliances and labor, cost $8,000.

''Most of the ideas for the kitchen came from my mother,'' Ms. Kim said. ''I'm used to cooking Korean, so I needed large areas for cutting and a stove with extra-large burners.''